The Eventual Recovery? Credit The American People
Janet Daley writes in the Telegraph/UK that it is not government that brings about revival in America but the American people:

Even Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal has finally been demythologised. All those works projects and federal programmes may have done something for national morale, but the hard economic evidence shows that the worst effects of the 1929 crash had begun to abate under Herbert Hoover, and that the Great Depression (which was arguably prolonged by FDR's policies) did not properly end until the US entered the Second World War.

The secret of the resilience of America's economic life is that its population consists of people with an inextinguishable determination to get on in life. ...It is worth repeating when circumstances require - of the fact that almost everybody now living in the US either is, or is descended from, somebody who made a conscious decision to go there.

The enormous, terrifying risk that was involved in this act, the personal courage and desperation that it involved, was directly to do with fear of oppression or persecution by the state. You went to America because you wanted to escape from the predations of overly powerful governments or to make your own way out of hopeless poverty. The obvious exceptions to this - the descendants of African slaves - serve to support the case: the cruelty of their fate and the social problems to which it led were exacerbated by being in a country where self-determination was supposed to be the chief object of life.

Americans see economic freedom as key to this, because they believe that personal prosperity is the guarantor of individual liberty. Their working and "blue collar" lower middle classes are not at all - and this is what I really hope that George (Osborne) understands - like the British equivalents. And, for that matter, their upper middle classes aren't much like the British ones either.

From my own entirely subjective, uncorroborated observation as someone who grew up in the US but has lived most of her adult life in Britain, I would say that the American working class was quite like the German one (hard-working, thrifty, self-reliant) and that its intellectual elite was more like the French (abstract, idealistic and passionate) than the empirical, pragmatic English.

When the US economy springs to life again, it will be because the people would not let it die. There will be countless citizens working two jobs, day and night, to get themselves and their families through the worst, and to put their kids through college. Agitation for welfare support and government help will come, not from proletarians like "Joe the Plumber" who became a national legend in 2008 because he wanted the government to get off his back and let him grow his business, but from cosmopolitan intellectuals who want to import European-style paternalism and class guilt which go back a long way before modern capitalism.